


Cry War

by Rednaelo



Series: The Hunter Sings [3]
Category: Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers: Rescue Bots
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Kaijuu Battle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-07
Updated: 2016-06-07
Packaged: 2018-07-12 19:44:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7119901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rednaelo/pseuds/Rednaelo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Those born into war must prepare themselves for blood.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cry War

**Author's Note:**

> Aight well sometimes I publish two fics in one day, it's not unheard of. I've actually been working on this installment of The Hunter Sings for a while but was kinda wishy-washy about where to go with it. But I think I ended up rounding it out decently. It's a small interlude, but an important one nonetheless. Chronologically, this takes place between Voice Becomes song and The Hunter Sings a Lullaby. And, again, due to Muse-kicking Project status, don't expect coherency or well-developed plot. It's just me writing stuff. I hope you enjoy it nonetheless!!
> 
> -Bec

“Drop time.”

“You’re four and twenty-three seconds and counting.”

“Good.”

“Check your safeties, Kade Burns!”

Kade snapped his helmet on and growled in response as he elbowed the safety scan and continued to strap himself into the pilot’s seat.  The cacophony of the hangar dulled once the cockpit was sealed.  He could still see the swarm of bioengineers below, the mechanics scrambling to Dock Four, the last of the medical technicians as they scurried after Dani’s gurney. 

Kade growled again.

“Shoulda sent us out first,” he said as he clicked the belts into place and gripped the joysticks like he was about to punch them through the windshield.  “Heatwave!”

Like a jag of lightning, Heatwave clicked the tap into the port at the back of Kade’s helmet and in an instant they were breathing together, chest and chassis heaving in a slow pull.  They shut out the world and curled their energy tight as Heatwave was pulled from Dock One to the launchdeck.

“You are three minutes and thirty seconds to launch,” Anna Baranova relayed.  “You have twenty minutes to complete your Phase One objective. Any longer than that any you are to abandon Phase One and proceed directly to Phase Two.”

“Pardon my French, Prof, but fuck that,” Kade snarled.  Heatwave’s machinery shuddered in tightly-wound anticipation and Kade felt that vindictive surge of purpose course through them both.  Between their bodies it rattled back and forth.  “We’re not coming back without them.”

“You are not to divert from the mission parameters.  That’s an order.”

_I won’t have to,_ Heatwave said, steadying the twitching muscles of Kade’s body and pulling the adrenal responses back into his own chassis.  _I’m bringing everyone home. I’m taking down that son of a bitch._

“Damn right,” Kade said.  Safety scan hit the green and Kade leaned forward. The footpedals came up and braced the soles of his boots, strapping him in.  The view before the windshield was sedate and boring.  Behind the hangar vault, the sea raged.  They could feel it, Kade and Heatwave.  A few feet of metal between them and the rest of the world.  “Twenty minutes,” Kade muttered.

_That’s all I need._

“I’ll be done in ten.”

_I’ll bring them back._

“I’ll send that fucker to hell.”

_It won’t stop me._

“Nothing can stop me.”

The vault cleared.

“LAUNCH IS GO!”

Kade slammed his foot on the throttle and punched the thrusters forward.

The rocket blasters on the bottom of Heatwave’s pedes fired and they were jettisoned into the hurricane.  The skies were black with rain and the waves rose and crashed in slates of green and gray, hard as ice, breaking over their armor.  Kade roared and they tore through the water to where, far on the strobing horizon, Chase and Charlie Burns were being constricted by a Category III.  Valkere, they were calling it over the comms, the surveyors and generals shouting the results of their scans to each other.  Kade and Heatwave didn’t have to hear a word of it now, the data rushing in as Sikari Code only.  No noise to distract.  Only the quiet and constant influx of code buoying their movements.

_They prepped the Concussion Rounds._

“How many loaded?”

_Two dozen.  Each one’s gotta count._

“Filter in the biometric computer,” Kade said, fists tightening around the joysticks as they cut closer, the tangle of their comrades thrashing in the hold of the Kaiju drawing closer.  “First shot to the weak point.”

_I want a tender spot to rip into._

“I’ll pollute the ocean if I have to.”

“Heatwave, you are thirty seconds incoming,” Baranova reported to them.  “Your time limit is at sixteen minutes, twelve seconds.”

Kade growled and Heatwave could taste it in his mouth.  The first three shells loaded into his right gauntlet, the next three prepped for his left.

“Countdown displayed,” Baranova continued.  The rain lashed against the display cameras, armor plates closed over the plastisteel to reinforce the cockpit.  Kade’s helmet displayed precisely what Heatwave saw with his optical feeds.  There was a shriek that stole lightning from the sky; they had been noticed.  The comms crackled to life as Chase’s optics caught sight of them and his shoulders pressed out against the body crushing him.

“Kade!” Charlie Burns cried out.  The Kaiju’s head rounded and it immediately abandoned its prey to latch onto Heatwave instead.  They didn’t even stop their charge.  Heatwave’s gauntlet lifted and punched right into the monster’s side and fire each of the cannons. 

Feedback filtered through.  They hadn’t even managed to crack a dent into the armor.

And then it began to crush down on them.  Kade grit his teeth.

“Get out!” he yelled over the comms.  “Get back to the hangar!”  A spike-studded tail whipped hard against Heatwave’s pedes, trying to swipe him off balance.

“I got another four strikes in me!” Chief Burns called back, firing one of them out, only to have it ricochet off of stony armor and fall to the sea.

“Unless those can actually do any damage, get back!”

Heatwave grabbed the root of the Kaiju’s tail and dug his fingers under the armor plate, prying it up from flesh.  He stopped when there was suddenly nothing in his hands.  The slinking son of a bitch had thrashed away and was swimming back towards Chase.

And then Chase went under.

“No!”

Heatwave tore after it, propulsions systems overclocking until they collided hard with Valkere’s back plates and planted their feet on its shoulders.  Chase was already bracing his hands against Valkere’s chest; all Heatwave had to do was reach underneath and start pulling those bones out of socket.

“Rip them out!” Kade roared and Heatwave gripped hard and yanked.  Chase was scrambling out from under them and retreating a ways away to try and aim at Valkere’s exposed underbelly.

In their grip, the monster thrashed and struggled, but was too harshly pinned to gain any sort of traction.

“Take the shot!” Kade growled over the comms.

“It’s not clean, I’ll hit you!” Charlie yelled back.

“Take the fucking shot!” Kade screamed.  They braced. 

There was a punching shudder from below and for a moment the world was silent.  The seamless flow of their synchronization fluttered, unsure. Kade looked down.  Heatwave looked down.  Valkere had been pierced through the side; Chase’s harpoon had barely scratched Heatwave’s armor.

It was Valkere’s tail spines, which had thrashed up reflexively and punctured through to the cockpit.  One barb, large as a traffic cone, had pierced Kade’s body.  Heatwave stole into the biometric computer of Kade’s flightsuit, assessing the damage.  Three ribs broken.  Kidney ripped through.  There was so much pain but the adrenaline was almost numbing where it was clinging to their nerves.  Their grip loosened; Valkere yanked its tail back and they gasped as the spines retracted.  Water poured in.  Chase was pursuing the fleeing monster but still screaming back for a status report from Heatwave.

The synchronization wavered.

_No…._

Kade pulled his hands away from the joysticks and slumped forward in the pilot’s seat.

_No, Kade, stay with me!_

When his hand touched his side, there was nothing but _hurt_ and it was sharp and deep and wet, hot like the sun burning inside him.  He felt dizzy.

Heatwave reached for the adrenal injectors but then stopped.  Kade was losing blood fast.  He needed suit patches. 

_Shit!_

Heatwave turned around and went to join Chase as he set the commands for Kade’s suit to start the temporary sealing.  Kade was rapidly losing consciousness.

_Hang in there, c’mon, Kade!  Stay with me!_

“I’m here,” Kade said, his breathing labored and hard, coppery saliva spilling inside his helmet as he struggled to inhale.

Heatwave aimed his gauntlets and fired the concussive rounds at the Kaijuu, charging them with the neutron galvanizer before punching them out of the barrels.  He roared.  Sikari mechs had no vocalizer but it was unmistakable that Heatwave was _screaming_.  His servos reached and caught wildly wriggling monster and he shredded into it, spilling the sea with electric blue poison.  Entire chunks of organic armor scattered into the water, glittering, like scales being sheared away from a fish.  Heatwave pummeled his hands into the monster’s belly and pulled on ropes of indigo viscera until they snapped.

_GIVE HIM BACK!_

“Heatwave!  Stand down!  Heatwave!  Kade, do you copy?  Stand down!”

The storm ripped all around Heatwave and the beast in his hands was long dead but Heatwave showed no sign of stopping until everything that was once inside came out.  Bones were cracked and thrown; Heatwave split Valkere’s sternum in a jagged fracture and then wrenched its ribcage open.  Its heart burst like a rotten pomegranate in his hands.

Inside, the world was far away.  Blood leaked from the port of Kade’s helmet and his vision bloomed back and forth between blackness and a haze of smeared color.  All around him was the constant hum of a distant song, low and rich with the echoes of something primal.  Kade blinked.  His world shuddered and he looked down at his hands, which were black and red as they always were when he wore his flightsuit.  They shimmered with blood; it was smeared across the console and splattered on the HUD.

“Heatwave…?”

There was no answer.  The screen showed a marbled ocean of slate gray and bright blue, speckled with dark offal.  A Kaijuu corpse and great, gory hands burrowing into it.

“Heatwave….”

Heatwave didn’t hear him.  Kade sipped a breath into his collapsing lungs. And then he did it again because he couldn’t do anything else. 

* * *

 Anna watched the magnets clamp onto Heatwave’s chassis and lock him into Dock One with her hands trembling lightly on the console.  His optics were dark.  Forcefully-induced stasis.  It was the first time since the Invoking that they had to do such a thing to any of the Sikari units.  And Kade….  Kade’s limp and mangled body was gently taken from Heatwave’s cockpit only after the bot had been shut down.  They had tried before and one of the medical technicians almost had her bones crushed from Heatwave’s defensive retaliation.

He’d threatened an innocent, a human.  Anna’s stomach was squeezed so tight under her racing heart.  She swallowed hard and collapsed back into the chair, a quaking cry falling loose from her without permission.

“Anna.”

Ezra’s hand found her shoulder and squeezed gently.

“What in the world happened?” she asked, not even bothering to look at him.  She kept her eyes on Heatwave, fearful he would rage through his dormancy and she’d see his optics burn red again as the magnalocks failed.  This was Heatwave….  She had put together his code and watched him grow from a simple algorithm on a black screen to the protective and passionate warrior and companion he was today.  And then she had watched him become a monster.

“I brought the feeds and readouts,” Ezra said, dragging up a nearby chair and taking a seat before offering the tablet he held to her.  “Play the video and you can see for yourself.” 

Anna’s fingers were still shaking as she hit the play button.  She watched the long and mostly uneventful recording of Kade inside the cockpit during the fight against Valkere.  She couldn’t see his face – his helmet obscuring his features completely – but in the way that he gripped the controls, that his body twisted and thrashed with each attack, she could watch his rage.  The code on Heatwave’s screen gave partial voice to their thoughts.  And when Valkere’s tail punched through the armor and jostled everything, she sucked a breath in through her teeth, her chest lurching.

Kade had gone still.  The spines withdrew and there was blood everywhere.  Anna flicked her eyes over to the printout that Ezra held of the status changes the Sikari and Pilot had gone through during their fight.  All timestamped. 

“The synchronization crashed,” she said, correlating the moment that Kade had been injured with a sharp drop in his brain activity.  “And part of Heatwave crashed with it.”

“Before that, their sync rate was at an astronomical 112%,” Ezra said, pointing it out on the charts.  “Which goes beyond anything we’ve recorded before.  And also demands a shift in our measurements.”

“Wonderful as that is,” Anna said, her brown crumpled with worry, “it also provides the disturbing hypothesis that the synchronization crash might have permanently damaged Heatwave.  He wouldn’t stop.  By the time Chief Burns and Chase finally brought him back to base, he was still ready to kill anyone who got close.  Which suggests his priority list has been completely scrambled.”  Anna heaved a hard sigh and put her head in her hands, staring down at the paused screen of the tablet in her lap: Kade Burns slumped forward in the pilot’s seat, looking for all the world like a corpse.  “We’ll have to do a reassessment of all of Heatwave’s code.  We can proceed from there once we know what needs to be done.”

“And I should call Optimus,” Ezra added.  Anna gave a mirthless bark of laughter and it was chased out by another sigh.

“Please,” she said.  “Call him, tell him everything.”  She sat back up and looked Ezra in the eyes.  “I’m so afraid.  Not for us, even.  For Heatwave.  For Kade.  What if they never come back from this?”

Ezra reached out and put his arms around her and for a while, there was nothing but the silence of a future with no promising outcome.  He never gave her an answer, which was fine because Anna didn’t want to hear one anyway.  She stayed in his arms until the urge to _do something, do anything_ won out and she went to pull the files needed to evaluate Heatwave’s coding errors.  Behind her, Ezra typed away at the nearest computer and after a while, she heard him say,

“Hello again, Optimus Prime.  I wish I could be calling under better circumstances….”

* * *

 Heatwave was out of commission for four months.  Kade was in the hospital in critical condition for half of that time.  Dani got out of the ICU faster than he did and then yelled at him as soon as he started gaining the color back in his cheeks.

“I’m fucking tired of seeing you in a hospital bed!”

“Pot, kettle,” he’d grumbled back at her, coughing to clear the phlegm in his throat.  And that was how that particular argument had ended.

He had one less kidney and artificially fused ribs and had to walk with a friggin’ walker because he’d lost so much muscle mass in his legs from being confined to a gurney for so long.  He would be back in the hangar as soon as he could walk for five minutes without collapsing into a sweating, breathless exhaustion.

“You’ll ruin your progress if you push yourself too hard too fast,” his father had said.  Kade had nodded but kept working hard anyway.  They hadn’t brought Heatwave out of stasis and he had been dormant and useless in Dock One the entire time.  They were afraid.  Kade knew exactly why; he’d heard what had happened when Heatwave had brought his unconscious body back to the hangar.  He’d talked to the nice medtech lady who had almost lost her life trying to get to him and save his.  He didn’t ask for her number but he did give her a hug and that was nice, in its own way.   Heatwave was still out cold and would be until Kade could plug back into the synchronization and only then would Heatwave be rebooted.  It was just a precaution.

Doc Greene said it was Optimus Prime who had made the recommendation to keep Heatwave dark.  And that was after the Doc had shown him the _pieces_ that remained of Valkere, photos and fragments and video clips of some of the most nightmarish stuff that Kade had apparently experienced firsthand but had no recollection of.

“Well, if I didn’t have PTSD before…,” Kade had joked as he flicked through the compiled album on Doc Greene’s tablet.  Neither of them laughed.  It wasn’t really funny at all and Kade didn’t even know why he’d said it.  He just kept thinking about his mech, dormant and alone and gathering dust in the hangar while Chase and Boulder – Dad and Graham – shouldered most of the world-saving.  Dani was still getting back on her feet.  Kade wouldn’t go back to the field for at least another month.

But he could at least make it to the hangar. 

He walked by himself and took the lift and dumped himself into the pilot’s seat rather than hoisting himself inside with a flourish like he usually would have.

It was so dark inside of Heatwave’s chassis.  Dead silent and cold.  Stale.  Kade swiped dust off of the windshield HUD and smeared it away on the knee of his pants, the bandages on his side still tugging at his skin enough to itch.

“I’m in a goddamn tomb,” he muttered before picking up the new visor that was left for him – the old one had cracked – and fixing it to his face.  He pulled down the tap and manually guided it to the port at the back of his skull, pressing it in gingerly.

“Fuck, that’s cold,” Kade hissed and then sagged back against the pilot’s seat with a belabored sigh.

“Everything alright, Kade?” Professor Baranova asked through his comms.

“Yeah.  Yeah, I’m fine, start him up.”

“Are you sure?” she asked.  And before Kade could assure her, yes, he really, really would like his partner in heroism to be alive again, she added, “you’re crying.”

Kade blinked.  And the tears spilled over his eyelashes to slide down his cheeks, warm and ticklish.

“Well, I am now,” he croaked into the microphone. Kade’s throat got caught on a lump as he swallowed back something ugly. He raked both hands through his hair and winced at the way it made the stitches pull in his side.  “The hell, Prof?”

“I only knew because your bio readouts are showing some abnormal activity in your parasympathetic nervous system,” she explained, like it actually made sense to him or would offer any insight as to why this was even happening.

“Would you just boot him up already, please?” Kade snapped, squeezing out a couple more tears as he tried to yank a blanket of anger over whatever bizarre sadness had welled up.  The tap was too cold, he could feel it like a shard of ice down his whole spine.  Everything was so goddamn empty.

“Kade, I need you to calm down,” Baranova said gently.  Kade was about to tell her to bite him but before he could get it out, she spoke again.  “When Heatwave was put into stasis last time, it was because he was completely beset with rage and fear.  We have no idea what he’ll be like when we bring him out of it, especially if he’s immediately going to enter synchronization with you.  If _you’re_ angry, _he’s_ going to be angry.”  Kade’s frustration faded away to make room for the sickening sadness to take its place again.  His hands wrapped listlessly around the joysticks and he slid down a little further in his seat.  “If you need to take a few minutes to get yourself centered, you can.”

“No,” Kade said, barely above a whisper.  “I don’t like being in here like this.  I need him to come back.  Please, Anna, please, it’s okay.  I’m okay.  Bring him back and we can start fixing this.”

There was a click of silence and Kade looked down, finding a smear of blood that someone missed in the cleanup.  For some reason, he thought it was Heatwave’s blood at first.  When he remembered that it was actually his own, the pit of nausea in his stomach evaporated. 

“Attention inside Hangar,” came Professor Baranova’s voice over the P.A., “Sikari designated Heatwave to be powered up immediately, please stand clear.” 

Kade closed his eyes and gripped the joysticks hard.

The feeling was like immediately falling into a deep sleep only to wake back up into full consciousness a second later.  And not only that, but it was like waking up to seeing a fifth dimension and existing twice as much as you did before.  Heatwave was gasping, surging and Kade felt himself move, try to move, searching for his bearings until—

There.  There he was.

_Kade?_

“I’m here, buddy, I’m here,” Kade gasped and his face was hot and wet and he hated it but he was so happy.

_I thought you were dead._

Kade bent over the dash console and buried his face in his folded arms.  Heatwave was still coming down from a panic.  He could feel it, red hot and tingling in his hands and his head.  But it was all muffled beneath the completely terrified _shock_ of having Kade there.  Almost like he didn’t believe it.  Heatwave was busy rapidly flickering through Kade’s memories of the months that had passed, looking for hard evidence that, yes, this was real, and Kade was really here.  He saw the surgeries – the aftermath, anyway – and the drawn-out process of physical therapy that was still ongoing. 

Then he plucked at the wounds.  He went straight to the broken ribs, patched organs, missing kidney, stitched flesh, and counted the inches of bruised, blood-blistered skin.  Every injury like an inventory, replaying video feeds of the same three seconds over and over again.  They could feel it every single time Valkere’s tail stabbed through the hull and pierced Kade through.

“Heatwave, stop,” Kade groaned, shuddering hard to catch his breath as a wave of despair rattled down his throat like a handful of stones.  There were so many tears; they fell one after the other between his feet on the floor and made a puddle and Kade tried to make himself stop but when he did, Heatwave just felt worse.

So he cried for the both of them.

_I was…I was alone, all of a sudden.  You were gone.  I couldn’t hear you._

Heatwave plunged right into the middle of Kade’s chest and spread himself out from that point, feeling along every nerve, every articulation of bone.  Yes, yes, he was here.  He was in Heatwave’s pilot seat, curled up and alive.  Their synchronization was as strong as ever. Heatwave never wanted to leave it.  Or maybe it was Kade that never wanted to leave. 

“Well, I made it,” Kade choked out, hands stretching to press against the windshield HUD.

_Stop that, it’s hurting._

“I don’t—  I can’t….”  Kade leaned back in the pilot’s seat instead and hit the proper lever to make it recline almost completely horizontally.  More tears soaked the headrest as Kade rested on his good side and put his arms around his chest, feeling Heatwave there in the spaces between his ribs.  “They might’ve decommissioned you,” Kade whispered.

_I thought you were dead._

And that was all there was to say about that.  Kade blocked all incoming comms, leaving behind a message to anyone who attempted that yes, he and Heatwave were fine.  He’d be back out in a couple hours.

_I don’t remember what happened.  I have the data, the video feeds, the audio logs, the transcripts.  I can see what happened.  But I don’t remember it for myself.  Everything from killing Valkere to making it home.  It’s all gone._

“That’s probably my fault,” Kade said gently as he kneaded his fingertips into the armrest.  “I don’t remember it either.”

_It’s not the same, Kade,_  Heatwave insisted. _I’m machine.  I don’t have ‘memories,’ I have records._

“Come on, Heatwave, that’s bullshit and you know it,” Kade grumbled, smearing away the tears that were clinging, cold, to the side of his face.  “You’re a Spark.  You’re part alien.  You have memories.  You have a soul.  You’re more than just a hunk of hardware.”

_Christ, Kade, warn me before you start showing me these parts of you.  I might start thinking you care for me._

“Can it, dipshit, I almost fucking lost you!”  Kade ran both hands hard through his hair, tugging at it a little to try and ground himself from the overwhelming flood of fear that welled up.  “There’s no _me_ without _you_ anymore.”  And it felt like there were a million more things, a billion more words to say to him, to reiterate and insist.  But Kade couldn’t say any of them.  He reached behind himself, ignoring the ache and tug in his side, and just wrapped his fingers tight around the tap plugged into him, almost as if he were trying to draw it even deeper.  “What was I going to do if I woke up and you were gone?”

_What was I going to do if I woke up and you were gone?_

When Heatwave repeated it back to him, it meant something else, but somehow it was exactly the same.  Heatwave took hold of Kade’s hands – Kade let him, no resistance whatsoever – and crossed them over his chest, palms resting on either shoulder.  And then, slowly, Heatwave aligned himself along Kade’s spine and rocked him.  Gently, slowly, back and forth in the pilot’s seat, with their eyes closed and their souls close. 

“We’re gonna be okay.”

_We’ll be just fine._

“Nothing like that will ever happen to us again.”

_We’re stronger than that._

“There’s nothing the world can throw at us that we won’t knock down together.”

_Kade…._

“Yeah, buddy?”

_I’m glad you’re here._

The arms around him squeezed a little tighter but Kade couldn’t tell if it was Heatwave or if it was himself.  It didn’t matter either way.  They both felt it.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Kade said back.


End file.
